This whole thing started with Altman pushing a safety oriented non-profit into a tense contradiction (edit: I mean the 2019-2022 gpt3/chatgpt for-profit stuff that led to all the Anthropic people leaving). The most recent timeline was
- Altman tries to push out another board member
- That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
- Altman's side escalates by saying they'll nuke the company
Altman's side won, but how can we say that his side didn't cause any of this instability?
But I said this because: They've retained the entire company, reinstated its founder as CEO, and replaced an activist clown board with a professional, experienced, and possibly* unified one. Still remains to be seen how the board membership and overall org structure changes, but I have much more trust in the current 3 members steering OpenAI toward long-term success.
That event wasn't some unprovoked start of this history.
> That board member escalates by pushing Altman out (and Brockman off the board)
and the entire company retaliated. Then this board member tried to sell the company to a competitor who refused. In the meantime the board went through two interim CEOs who refused to play along with this scheme. In the meantime one of the people who voted to fire the CEO regretted it publicly within 24 hours. That's a clown car of a board. It reflects the quality of most non-profit boards but not of organizations that actually execute well.
See this article for all that context (>>38341399 ) because it sure didn't start with the paper you referred to either.
It seems that the safety team within OpenAI lost. My biggest fear with this whole AI thing is hostile takeover, and openAI was best positioned to at least do an effort to prevent that. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.
It was a classic antisocial academic move; all she needed to do was talk to Altman, both before and after writing the paper. It's incredibly easy to do that, and her not doing it is what began the insanity.
She's gone now, and Altman remains, substantially because she didn't know how to pick up a phone and interact with another human being. Who knows, she might have even been successful at her stated goal, of protecting AI, had she done even the most basic amount of problem solving first. She should not have been on this board, and I hope she's learned literally anything from this about interacting with people, though frankly I doubt it.
The board was incompetent. It will go down in the history books as one of the biggest blunders of a board in history.
If you want to take drastic action, you consult with your biggest partner keeping the lights on before you do so. Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley had no business being on this board. Even if you had safety concerns in mind, you don't bypass everyone else with a stake in the future of your business because you're feeling petulant.
She had many, many other options available to her that she did not take. That was a grave mistake and she paid for it.
"But what about academic integrity?" Yes! That's why this whole idea was problematic from the beginning. She can't be objective and fulfill her role as board member. Her role at Georgetown was in direct conflict with her role on the OpenAI board.